This Cake is for the Party (10 page)

Friday listened to every word she said. She calmly stepped out of the car because Nina had asked her to do it.

Nina spread out her arms for me, and I hugged her. It felt like embracing a sheet of vellum. Brooks touched the top of my head. I smiled brightly, as though he'd knighted me.

Goodbye, Lilian, he said.

I stood behind the Volvo as Brooks made a six-point turn in the small driveway. He watched me in his mirrors and I used my hands to signal where the tree trunks were, and called out that it was safe to keep coming, keep coming, a little more, now stop. Okay, now you can go.

Friday and I both stood in the driveway for a while, long after the Volvo's tail lights had disappeared beyond the hill, long after I stopped hearing the engine humming down the gravel road. Friday's ears were up, full triangles. Her tail was at rest, but poised for action. She stared deep into the distance, as if she could see beyond the trees and the leaves, as if she could still see them in the car, even though they were long gone.

Oh, go on, I said. Just go.

Standing Up
for Janey

Janey stands on a wooden platform in front of three angled mirrors, twisting so she can see how the dress looks from the back. There are a hundred little covered buttons running up her spine. The silk straps are too long for her. They wilt off her shoulders. The attendant nips them with two pinched fingers. We can fix those, she says. Don't worry about the straps.

Janey catches my eye in the centre mirror. You're supposed to cry when you see me try it on, she says. That's how I'll know it's the right one.

I turn my head sideways and blink a few times.

Stop faking it, Janey says.

Let's try it with the veil, the attendant says, then rustles off.

When we're alone in the dressing room, I say, You're joking, right?

Janey looks at her reflection. Yes, she says, talking to the mirror, I'm joking. She pokes one foot out from under the hem, holding her skirt, pointing her toes like a dancer. A long white thread hangs from the seam of the bodice. I want to tug at it, but I'm afraid it might make the whole dress unravel.

I like it, I tell her. It's simple. Classic.

Janey reaches into the front of the dress and lifts her left breast so it rests properly in the cup. Then she shimmies both breasts closer together to make more cleavage.

All brides think they have simple gowns, she says. Ask anyone who's been married. She'll say, My dress was very simple.

I watch Janey's reflection. It's like I've been watching her in a mirror ever since the engagement. My response wavers like a needle on a polygraph: dopey joy, strange feeling of dread. I have always felt suspicious of weddings. But I'm her maid of honour. There are these shots of anxiety in my chest that I can't explain.

This isn't a simple dress, Janey says to me in the mirror. The buttons alone make it complicated.

Janey and Milt were going to have a potluck at the YMCA Community Room. The plan was: a simple wraparound skirt and whatever flowers were in season. Milt's band would play after they said their vows. But then Janey booked a priest at St. Anthony's and talked Milt into platinum wedding bands. Milt is a high school teacher trying to save up for a used Toyota, and Janey hasn't even found herself a job yet. Something from Birks, she told him. We should have something in a little blue box. These are the rituals we have in North America.

Three weeks later, back at my place, Janey sits in the living room playing with her pack of cigarettes, trying not to smoke them. She has something to say. I'm in the kitchen breaking garlic cloves apart, arranging them on the tray for the toaster oven. I'm charring red peppers in the big oven. I've placed a bowl of fat green olives on the table, and a loaf of Calabrese bread with my good knife stuck in it. Milt and his sister are coming over in about an hour. I'm making dinner for all of us tonight. Except David. I haven't seen him since he moved out of our apartment six weeks ago. What's the rule about getting over a breakup? Does it take twice as much time as the length of the relationship, or half as much time? It has to be half. I can't spend ten years feeling like this.

My cat, Timotei, slinks around the corner and sticks her chin up at me. She smells the olives. When she was a kitten, I would find her on the pantry shelf licking the cap from the olive oil bottle. David trained her to stop that with a blue plastic water pistol. She'd never jump on the shelf now. But she still loves olives. I pinch one from the dish, pop it in my mouth, and bend down to let her lick my outstretched finger. Her tongue is pink and serrated.

The school just asked Milt to be the wrestling coach. Janey says he's excited. Deep inside the heart of every man, she told me, there is a boy who loves to wrestle. But I just can't picture it. I keep thinking of Milt yelling at a pile of boys squatting and wriggling over each other in the gymnasium. Then I think of Milt playing mandolin at the Teahouse Café every Friday night. David would tell me that people contradict themselves, that this is what makes us human, and that I have to learn to tolerate it. And he's right. I should enjoy our contradictions. I slip the tray of garlic cloves into the little oven and turn the knob to max.

David forgot a whole case of his special Chianti when he moved out. It's a vintage he ordered direct from Italy from Wine Online. He hoarded the wine for so long, waiting for an occasion that was special enough to drink it. And then, impossibly, he abandoned it. Sometimes, despite myself—usually late at night when I can't sleep and my spirit is weak—I'll open the cabinet door just to look at the twelve dark, moody bottles.

When I invited him to come to dinner tonight, he said, You know that's a bad idea, Bonnie. But David should be here tonight, he really should. I mean, for Janey and Milt.

I ceremoniously take the middle one out of the top row. The label is gold, like the inside wrapper of a good bar of chocolate. An embossed image of an old castle. Too ostentatious for my taste. This wine is ten years old already.

Bonnie, come in here and keep me company, Janey calls to me.

I pull the cork with my eyes closed like I'm making a wish.

Everything's done, I say, coming out with two glasses.

She's stretched out on the couch, barefoot. When did they say they'd get here?

We have lots of time, I say. I find myself a spot on the floor. Now, you tell me.

She reaches for the wine. First, you have to promise.

There's a collection of cat hair underneath the couch. I don't usually see the couch from this angle. I resist the urge to get up and vacuum before Milt and his sister get here.

Becky makes me nervous, I say. Does she seem uptight to you?

Becky was raised by her grandmother, she tells me. But she's fine.

Who raised Milt?

Janey curls her toes over the arm of the couch. His dad came back when he was a kid, she says. But his grandmother took care of him too, I guess. Still lying down, she twists her hair with one finger and holds her wine in the other hand. The glass teeters and I'm afraid she's going to spill it.

You're lucky that Milt is so laid-back, I say. David could be so uptight.

Janey says, I saw David last night. He's still uptight.

I watch Janey's wineglass. Where? I try to sound nonchalant.

Do you really want to hear this? Janey says. Should I be telling you this?

Was he with someone?

He was with us.

Timotei has coiled herself around the corner and into the living room. She finds me on the floor and dives headfirst into the carpet at my feet, then wriggles onto her back, asking for a rub.

I'm fine, I say, though I feel a lick of fear in my belly. The truth is that I'm relieved to not be with David anymore. I didn't trust him when he lived with me. But the problem is, now he's gone and I still don't trust him. I know it's none of my business whom he's drinking with at Legends. I know I have to let go.

Tell me the story, I say to Janey.

Well, you know how Legends is so awful, Janey says. I mean, I won't even drink anything out of a glass there. Have you ever held a Legends glass up to the light? So poor David, he's trying to order a nice glass of wine. Who drinks wine at Legends? I kept telling him, Just get a beer, just get a beer.

She laughs and takes a sip of the Chianti. Now this is nice wine, she says.

It's David's, I tell her. He forgot about a case of this in the closet when he left.

It's quiet for a minute. The red peppers sizzle in the oven. I rub my hand over Timotei's belly, those little pink nubs buried in silver fur.

What did you want me to promise? I ask.

That you'll always be my best friend, she says.

I've missed my chance. Whatever it was, she's not going to tell me now. I brought a kind of cancer into our conversation by saying the words
when he left
. But the air around Janey still shimmers. She looks like she's just fallen in love.

Are you whitening your teeth? I ask.

Janey sits up on the couch, sets her wineglass down on the coffee table, and stares at me. Her skin smooth and holy like scrubbed stone.

To make her laugh again, I say, You're not screwing around with anyone, are you?

She puts her hand up to her mouth. I can't believe it, she says. Why would you ask me that?

Janey is still wearing that silver bracelet with the hummingbird engraved in the band. It's a Haida design. I found it for her in Vancouver, before we ever met these men. I gave it to her as a coming-off-antidepressants gift. She went off the Paxil too quickly, though, and relapsed into an even worse depression soon after I gave it to her.

I moved into her little West End apartment with the Murphy bed that I pushed back into the wall each morning. We smoked Nat Shermans out on the fire escape and listened to Buddhist meditation tapes. When a thought appears in your mind, the monk told us, imagine it as a soap bubble, and push it away with a feather.

I used a small scalpel blade to shave tiny piles of powder from the blue pills, measuring minuscule amounts so she could come off gradually. It took over a month, but she hasn't been on them since, as far as I know. Not counting the occasional Xanax before bed, or Ativan for the plane.

I was just joking, I say to her. I focus on her wrist when I say this. I wasn't seriously suggesting it.

The bones in Janey's wrists are very fine. There are pale blue veins just under the surface. Janey has always looked lovely in blue. It occurs to me that this could be because of her thin skin.

It's not obvious, then? she asks.

I look up at her.

I told him that it had to stop, she says. She drops her hand to my ponytail and loosens the elastic. Let me play with your hair. When was the last time someone played with your hair?

She sifts strands of my hair through her fingers. My shoulders have been perched up around my ears all day. Her nails trace fine lines through my roots, like the long toothpicks they used to check for lice in grade school. I close my eyes, absorb the shiver.

Wait, I say. You still want to get married, right?

Yes. Of course. He was—This wasn't like that. It was just something I needed to do before the wedding.

I love Milt, I say. Milt is good.

Milt is good, she agrees.

The wineglass feels cool in my hand. I'm surprised by Janey's affair, but not shocked. She's been so remote. I want to press her for details, but I'm cautious.

We assume love is singular, Janey says. She's making a braid now. That it's exclusive. Why do we do that?

Chemistry, I tell her. It's chemistry you're talking about.

Maybe, she says. Maybe chemistry regulates love.

Love is a decision, I say.

If love is a decision, and there's no magic meant-to-be, then it's just arbitrary, isn't it? We could just be with anyone.

I pull away from Janey's hands. I stand up and look at her. She's sitting cross-legged on the couch, the way we used to sit when we were meditating.

Do you love this guy? I ask.

She puts her hands to her face. I think so, she says. Bonnie, I feel a little out of control.

And I can see it there inside her, the squirm of serotonin, the flush in her cheeks. I cross my arms and nod my head, aware that it makes me look more judgmental than I actually feel. Well this explains it, then, I say. The white dress. The platinum wedding bands.

I was always going to be an ironic bride, Janey says.

I manage to say, You look great, Milt, and hold my cheek up when he gives me a kiss in the doorway. He has showered recently, and I smell something herbal when he comes close, like rosemary, or marijuana. Behind him, Becky gives my hallway an appraising look.

Thanks for doing this, Milt says.

It's my pleasure, I say. I'm so happy you're here.

No, I mean, we appreciate what you're doing tonight.

Oh, it's nothing, I say, flinging my hand. I love this, I love having you. I can't look into Milt's open face for longer than a couple of seconds. His big eyes, his wide mouth. When he smiles, it's like he's throwing open a set of double doors so you can step out onto the veranda.

It smells wonderful in here, Becky says to me. She's wearing a gold Thai silk scarf. It makes her hazel eyes look yellow.

It's the garlic, I tell her, and run into the kitchen.

Is she okay? I hear Becky ask Janey. I don't hear the reply, because as soon as I reach the kitchen, something explodes inside the toaster oven.

I come back out, unharmed, with glasses of Chianti for Becky and Milt.

One of my garlics popped, I tell them. I try to say this calmly, but I don't know if I pull it off. I hand them each a glass. I was roasting garlic, I add, unnecessarily.

You're supposed to wrap the whole bulb in tinfoil, Becky tells me. To protect the cloves.

Aha, I murmur into my glass.

Becky is an installation artist. Her last show involved fibre optic cables and old letters from her great-grandparents. I think she wove the wires through the letters, making some kind of light-blanket. Janey told me that Becky is an extraordinary grant writer. She's shown her work in Berlin and New York City. I wish I knew more about her work. I should have Googled her before she arrived.